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“Do I not look it?”
“You look more tired than usual,” she pointed out.
He sighed and gestured to his computer, but she shook her head and leaned her elbow on the table.
“It’s more than that, and you know it. Did something happen?”
“No new trauma, if that’s what you’re asking,” he told her. It was true. Doing sex work wasn’t half as bad as when he had his frat boy phase, fucking a bunch of self-hating, closeted rich boys who sucked his dick and then tormented him for making them “feel gay.” And when his clients did shit like that, at least he got paid for it.
“That face,” she said, slapping her hand on the table. “That’s the face. How many more nights do you have left before you can quit?”
Technically, he could quit right then. He had one more tuition payment and a nice, fat nest egg sitting in his bank account, which would help him find a place to rent and live comfortably while he figured out what he wanted his grown-up future to look like. Which was, at the moment, a cushy community college job so he could get his mostly funded PhD somewhere nice. Like the East Coast, where there were proper seasons and, like, regular rain.
But in truth, he was afraid to quit. He was afraid what he had wasn’t enough.
His therapist would tell him that was just a trauma response to being thrown out and left with nothing at twelve—alone, starving, and unable to legally work to feed himself. She’d once compared his compulsive need to hoard cash to the people who had recovered from the Great Depression and began to hoard nonperishables when they started gaining popularity in the US.
“Logically,” she’d said to him, “you know you’re safe and capable of taking care of yourself. But your brain may never fully accept that.”
When he’d asked her how to work around that, she’d just laughed softly and shook her head. And okay, she’d given him some coping strategies when it all became too much, but he realized that mostly he’d just have to accept he was a little…different from most people.
“Soon,” he finally said when he realized Kels was waiting for an answer. “Just a couple more weekends, and I’m good to go.”
He would keep going until winter break. Then he’d have one full semester with no lectures, no work, and no responsibility except to perfect his thesis and defense. It sounded like heaven and hell all wrapped into one soggy emotion-burrito.
Kelsi sighed and stood up. “I gotta run. Johnstone wanted me to prep his station before class today, and I’m trying to get back on his good side.”
Kelsi was always on her professors’ bad sides, but he didn’t point that out. He just waved at her, then remembered he had a salad that was even warmer and soggier than before. Shoving it aside, he leaned back in his chair, realized he wasn’t going to get any more work done for the day, and slammed his laptop shut.
It wasn’t going to kill him to give in to procrastination for a single day, anyway. Boba tea was calling his name, and frankly, all he really wanted was to enjoy the peace and quiet before his next client.
Because the way things were going, God only knew what this stranger was going to want.
Chapter3
There wassomething almost cruelly poetic about the rental having stairs. Victor stood leaning against the railing with his suitcase at his side, fighting the urge to laugh. It had been hisonerequest with the rental agency, and if he hadn’t booked it as a surprise, he might have wondered if this was a gift from Alice.
A month ago, he wouldn’t have been able to even consider her being so small and petty.
But he was starting to realize he’d never actually known her. He just knew the version of herself she’d offered so he’d marry her. The unkindness of her could almost be considered an art form.
With a sigh, he looked over his shoulder at his car and regretted not using his driver, but he’d wanted to do this alone. He didn’t want to feel pampered or coddled. He wanted to lick his wounds in peace without getting stares full of pity that seemed to follow him around the moment everyone learned about what Charlie and Alice had done.
Everyone in Victor’s life was currently on mute—some of them permanently blocked from his personal line. His last conversation with Emil had informed him that Charlie was taking an extended leave of absence, so at the very least, he wouldn’t be in the office when Victor went back to work.
He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not because Victor also wasn’t the kind of guy who liked to hide from his problems. His parents had drilled that into his head from six months old when the doctor took one look at his legs and said, “He’s probably never going to be able to walk.”
His mother had taken that as a personal challenge.
He wasn’t sure if it was lucky or not that his specific type of cerebral palsy didn’t normally prevent children from walking, but it wasn’t well studied back then in the darker ages of late-seventies medicine. Either way, his mother liked to take all the credit herself for creating his sense of determination rather than thanking science and the doctors that performed surgery after surgery to loosen his tendons and even the three times they’d fucked around inside his actual brain in an attempt to help his balance.
Now he was going to use all that early intervention, determination, and sheer spite to climb the goddamn stairs into his honeymoon rental and wallow in what might have been.
It took him two minutes, which he chalked up to both the long drive and the fact that he hadn’t slept more than a few hours in the last two weeks. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Alice’s face as she was getting railed by his best friend, and, well…
It didn’t make for the best dreams.
In his subconscious, he was both a murderer and a weak, spineless piece of shit who begged for her to take him back.
